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Nietzsche death mask Photo: Van Stein |
Sedona,
ultimately, is an aberration: warm and
fuzzy fluff, like cotton candy and lint–a fatuous deviation from a rightful Surreal
Bounce destination.
The genuine
message manifests via Talia Jones (daughter of Davy, the Monkee), a landscape designer
who inadvertently tunes into our mania after a tour of Van Stein’s
nocturnes in my Tree House.
“Have you been
to Sils Maria?” she asks. “For
Nietzsche?”
Nietszche?
Nietzsche? Nietzsche!
It hits me,
bang: Creativity and madness, God and
the devil… Damn! That was Friedrich Nietzsche swirling around my
left hand in Sedona, hollering Wake up,
wake up, you maniacs–you are in zee wrong place!
We’d gotten side-tracked into a haze of red dust.
Sedona'd.
Sedona'd.
But now, some clarity: We must get our butts, pronto, to Switzerland’s Engadine Valley, to the village of
Sils Maria, where the Great Thinker summered all through the 1880s, thinking
thoughts that had never been thunk before and writing them into great
philosophical works about God and The
Antichrist before syphilis ate his brain and dispatched poor Fritz into sheer madness.
“I think we meandered,” I explain to Van
Stein over martinis in Lucky's.
“Are you calling
me a meanderthal?” says Van Stein, shaking his
head. “We’re not meandering. Something is beckoning us. Karma-geddon.”
“It’s a someone,” I say. “Nietzsche.”